He had
suffered terribly, had rendered great services and it was at least
reasonable that he should expect a welcome. What happened is tersely
told by Rufus Rockwell Wilson:
"When, at the age of sixty-five, he came again to the nation
he had helped to create, he was met by the new faces of a
generation that knew him not, and by the cold shoulders,
instead of the outstretched hands, of old friends. This was
the bitter fruit of his 'Age of Reason,' which remains of
all epoch-making books the one most persistently misquoted
and misunderstood; for even now there are those who rate it
as scoffing and scurrilous, whereas its tone throughout is
noble and reverent, and some of the doctrines which it
teaches are now recognised as not inimical to religion."
Brailsford, of a more picturesque turn of phrase, says that
"slave-owners, ex-royalists, and the fanatics of orthodoxy" were
against him, and adds:
"... The grandsons of the Puritan Colonists who had flogged
Quaker women as witches denied him a place on the
stage-coach, lest an offended God should strike it with
lightning.
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